The discussion below is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.
Named entity (NE) Recognition is an initial step for many tasks in the fields of natural language processing and Information Retrieval (IR). Named entities are typically important terms in sentences or phrases in that they comprise persons, places, amounts, dates and times to name just a few. In some applications, specific named entity recognizers are used to recognize specific types of named entities. For instance, in a query or command provided to a computer stating “schedule a meeting with JoeS for next Thursday”, the word or token “JoeS” would be recognized by an EmailAlias named entity recognizer, while the terms “next Thursday” would be recognized by a DateTime named entity recognizer. Once the named entities have been recognized, the query can be thought of as “schedule a meeting with <EmailAlias> for <DateTime>”, where <EmailAlias> and <DateTime> are slots for purposes of Information Retrieval and Semantic Slot-Filling (SF).
Difficulties however can exist when processing queries in a client-server environment. In this environment, a user provides input into a client machine that in turn forms a basis of a query to a server located remotely from the client, and more importantly is typically designed to service a number of non-related clients. For example, a server can perform certain tasks such as scheduling a meeting, sending email or arranging travel itineraries to name just a few. Named entity recognition is difficult in this environment because the tasks to be performed by the server (e.g. information retrieval) may not be well defined or even known on the client machine, thereby making named entity recognition for the task to be performed or processed by the server extremely difficult. Likewise, the server will not have access to specific information residing on each of the client machines such as a contacts list of the user having specific names and email addresses that the user corresponds with. Accordingly, named entity recognition in this environment is a problem.